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Tech NewsThis Song’s Rhythm Is Inspired by Neil Armstrong’s Heartbeat on the Moon
Forty-five years ago, a man landed on the moon for the first time. Understandably, he was a little nervous. Neil Armstrong’s heart raced to 160 beats per minute as the lunar vehicle touched down on the moon’s surface. But as he made that great leap for mankind and walked around the moon, his heart steadied … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsHow That Giant Hole in Sibera Could Have Formed
By now, you’ve likely seen the mysterious, yawning hole that appeared in Russia’s remote Yamal peninsula, a place whose name literally means “the end of the world.” How perfectly spooky! But now that scientists made it out to investigate the hole, let’s sort out the facts, conjectures, and conspiracy theories about how it came to … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsElectricity-Eating Bacteria Are Real and More Common Than We Thought
In the extreme world of bacteria, stunts such as living in hot springs or without oxygen are, like, totally unimpressive. But then there are bacteria that live off electricity, feeding directly on naked electrons. Even more surprisingly, scientists are finding that these bacteria are not even that rare. “Stick an electrode in the ground, pump … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceHealth
How the Internet Is Helping a Father Fight an Illness Unknown to Science
In 2012, Matt Might sat down to write a blog post. The 5,000-word essay titled “Hunting Down My Son’s Killer,” which was also republished on Gizmodo, documented his and his wife’s harrowing attempt to make sense of their son’s mysterious illness. The post went viral online—setting the family down a road that could change medical … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
These Cemeteries Are All That Remain of Mountains Destroyed by Mining
Mountaintop removal mining is exactly as destructive as it sounds. In West Virginia coal country, entire mountaintops have been stripped into barren wastelands for the sake of coal. But every once in a while, you’ll see a lonely island of green—a centuries-old cemetery that just barely continues to exist. In this video from the BBC, … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Norway’s Turning Power Plant Emissions Into Fish Oil
With millions of tons of carbon dioxide billowing into the atmosphere from our power plants, one possible solution to the pollution is carbon capture—sequestering the greenhouse gas before it ever leaves the plant. But then what do you do with all that carbon? Norway has a interesting new plan: farm salmon. Carbon capture has recently … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Google Street View Cars Find Hundreds of Gas Leaks in Cities
If you live in an old city surrounded by history, chances are you also live with hundreds if not thousands of gas leaks all around you. It’s bad for you (think explosions) and bad for the environment (think global warming), so we should probably do something about it. That’s why Google Street View and the … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsThe World’s Most Terrifying Pool Can Simulate Any Wave
Definitely not coming to water park near you is a FloWave, a state-of-the-art wave poolthat whips water around, simulating waves as tall as 90-feet and currents at 20 feet per second. FloWave is a real ocean simulator, you see, and its job is to prepare our infrastructure for the violent battering of the seas. Where … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Plan to Store Wind Energy In Giant Underwater Air Bubbles
Weather is annoyingly fickle, and so is the wind. If massive offshore wind farms are going to become reality, we need better ways to store the extra energy from windy days for the windless ones. One a bizarre-sounding idea floating around: giant balloons of compressed air stored deep underwater. Like many good ideas, the seeds … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsThe Rotating Building Where the Offices of the Future Will Be Tested
High up in the hills of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory sit four square, blue buildings you’d be forgiven for finding nondescript. Inside, they’re decorated with drab gray carpet familiar to any cubicle worker. But it’s the buildings’ electronic guts that make them unique in the whole world. These labs—including one that rotates 270 degrees—are where … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Metal Once Used to Coat DVDs Could Make Ultrathin Color Screens
It’s 2014 and DVDs are years past futuristic. But researchers at Oxford think that a metal alloy in DVDs could also be used to make thin, flexible, and low-power screens for wearables. Here’s how it works. Both the novel screens and DVDs function by exploiting the phase change properties of germanium-antimony-tellurium (GST). Shooting a laser … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Tragic Tale of Atomic Man: Life as a Radioactive Human
For the first time since the accident in 1976, workers at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington are planning to clean out the roomwhere chemicals exploded in Harold McCluskey’s face, showering him with radiation 500 times the occupational limit and embedding radioactive americium in his skull, turning him into the Atomic Man. McCluskey, improbably, survived the … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Scientists Are Dropping Explosives All Over Mount St. Helens On Purpose
What could go wrong with setting off explosives all around an active volcano? As scary as it might sound, this is a carefully planned experiment to peer inside Mount St. Helens’ mysterious underground magma chamber. No, we aren’t blasting the volcano open, but the induced seismicity will let geologists finally map what the volcano looks … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Tiny Changes in Earth’s Gravity Can Help Predict Floods Months Away
When the Missouri River spilled over its banks in a catastrophic 2011 flood, we could have seen it coming—from space, that is. There’s more to the story than meets the eye: the satellites don’t take photos of snowpacks or rivers, but rather, they detect tiny changes in gravity over the Earth’s surface to track water. … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceBiology
The Weird Reason Why So Many Turtles Are Delaying Flights at JFK
Remember whendozens of mating turtles shut down a whole runaway at JFK International Airport in 2009? It was only the start of a turtle invasion that has vexed travelers and perplexed biologists for years. But we may have figured out why turtles are all over the tarmac, and it has to do with raccoons. Turtles … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Differences Between a Budweiser and a Craft Brew (In GIFs)
We all sort of have an idea of how it works: craft brew is lovingly hand-coaxed into existence, while commercial brew is rattled around in big, scary machines, right? Well let’s see with our own eyes. The good folks at St. Louis Public Radio have done a fun GIF series peeking inside the operations of … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsThis Pop Song Is Actually a Cover of an Obscure “Tone-Poem” from 1987
Are you going to a party this weekend? It’s the fourth of July, so probably. Then you’ll want to put on YACHT’s delightfully poppy “Psychic City,” which is, surprisingly, a cover of a totally bizarre non-song song from the 1980s. As YACHT explained over at their blog, the original, erh, tone-poem that became Psychic City … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
What Are Your Favorite Fireworks?
Readers, I have a confession. Having grown up in the puritanical state of Massachusetts where even sparklers are illegal, I knew fireworks only as explosions in the far-off sky. I did not know fireworks were things ordinary people could buy, touch, and maim themselves with. But then I spent last summer in Washington state, where … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
There Are Vast Reserves of Ancient Freshwater Hidden Below the Ocean
When you’re drilling deep under the seabed, the last thing you might expect is freshwater. Yet Danish scientists on a recent expedition in the Baltic Sea suddenly found freshwater gushing up from their drill. In fact, undersea freshwater reserves are hidden all over the world, and some claim this could quench our thirst for decades … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Your Cable Box Is Wasting Absurd Amounts of Energy and Money
Electricity bill got you down? Blame your cable box or PlayStation or printer or refrigerator or any of your smart, networked devices that have a gentle-sounding but energy-sucking “standby mode.” A new report from the International Energy Agency puts the energy from networked devices worldwide at 616 terawatt-hours. That’s more than the entire energy consumption … Continued
By Sarah Zhang
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